


The Realm of You

by wendelah1



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Gen, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-04
Updated: 2009-12-04
Packaged: 2017-10-04 03:52:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wendelah1/pseuds/wendelah1
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They were spiraling down together into a dark, dark place.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Realm of You

**Author's Note:**

> Fifth season, spoilers for _Christmas Carol, Emily, Patient X, and The Red and the Black_. It takes place before _Mind's Eye_.

Scully had finished the autopsy and was walking out to the parking lot through the small hospital lobby, when she noticed the little boy and his parents. He couldn't have been more than two, with dark hair, dark brown eyes and soft looking olive skin. He was dressed for the warming days of April in Arizona, wearing a tee-shirt and shorts, and tiny leather sandals. The parents were young, both Latino, casually dressed in jeans, tee-shirts and cheap running shoes. Nice, clean, probably working class kids. The young woman's turquoise underpants showed a little bit above the waistband of her generic brand jeans. The parents walked into the elevator right behind her, but the child she had assumed was theirs didn't. Just before the elevator doors closed, she glimpsed the toddler running gleefully back into the lobby, toward the waiting area.

Apparently, she had misjudged the relationship. She took a quick glance out of the corner of her eye: two parents, a stroller, stocked with some bottles of water in the basket, some folded baby blankets, an empty baby bottle, and a large stuffed yellow rabbit lying in the seat. The father's face was stoic. He was staring straight ahead at the door in front of them. The mother's eyes were wet, her face downcast, her lips were trembling. The young man took a hand off of the stroller's handle, and put it awkwardly around his companion's shoulders. She slumped against him, as he stroked her head.

Scully knew that these parents would never leave behind a child who was critically ill. They certainly wouldn't take the baby's lovey away. Whatever had transpired back there with their child must have been very bad indeed. She quietly looked away, feeling like she had invaded their privacy. She felt embarrassed by her earlier assumption. The elevator doors finally opened, and the couple walked ahead of her into the parking structure. Scully stepped out of the elevator after them, waiting for a few seconds, to allow some distance.

Though her eyes had filled a bit, the tears this time were not for her, or for Emily. Sad as that was, she hadn't had the emotional investment of a parent. She hadn't carried the child in her womb, or nursed her, or been a mother at all, not really. She had mourned the loss of a possibility, and was angered by her daughter's needless suffering and early death. But how much worse it would be to lose a child you had really known and loved.

She drove silently back to the motel, trying not to think about that empty stroller. She got out of the car and walked up to the door of Mulder's room, and opened it. He was lounging on the double bed, eyes on the TV, flipping through the channels. The remains of a large pizza sat next to him. He looked up when she walked in.

"Hey, Scully. I've got some left-over pizza, and there's another iced tea on the dresser, if you want it…" He looked at her face and fell silent.

"Thank you, Mulder, but I'm not hungry. The autopsy found nothing out of the ordinary, I'm afraid. I'm tired. I'm going to bed early. Good night."

She walked out before he could reply and unlocked the door to her room. Switching on the light, she looked around at the sparsely furnished room, at the neatly made bed, her small suitcase, and her laptop. She felt drained and empty. She and Mulder had argued about the case, which had no supernatural elements whatsoever as far as she was concerned. Mulder characteristically held the opposite opinion. The disagreement wasn't what was troubling her, she knew. It was Mulder. Or rather, her relationship, working and personal, with her mercurial partner.

She knew that they were as disconnected emotionally and professionally as they had ever been in the five years that she had know him and been partnered with him. He had been treating her like fragile glass ever since Emily, and she resented it. He had been hurt by her declaration to him in the hospital after the burnings at Ruskin Dam.

"If you ask me now to follow you again, to stand behind you in what you now believe, without knowing what happened to me, without those memories, I can't. I won't." She had told him this lying in her hospital bed, her burns still fresh and covered in glycerin.

She had been likewise hurt by his reaction to her hypnosis session with Dr. Werber. He didn't believe her recovered memories of the events that night at Ruskin Dam. He didn't believe her because they didn't fit into his latest theory about the government conspiracy to hide "The Truth" from the American people. She couldn't stop feeling as though she had failed Mulder somehow, even though the session with Werber had been at his urging. She shook herself out of the reverie. She had been over this ground before, trying to sort out her feelings about Mulder from her feelings about the work. The problem was, she couldn't do it. It was all bound up together now for her: the losses, the criminal invasions into her body and her personal life, and Mulder.

Mulder. She loved him. She did. And she knew he loved her as well, in his own careless way. For her, the problem was that ever since last Christmas, when he had finally told her what he knew, what he had known for years about the cause of her inability to have children, she had felt violated. And not just by the men who had abducted her, and stolen her ova. She couldn't rid herself of this feeling, she could only bury it, until inevitably it would resurface, as it did today, triggered this time by a glimpse into an empty stroller that held only a well-loved yellow bunny.

He could see in her eyes when the feeling came. He knew, as soon as she had spoken to him in the motel room. He could see her shame, her anger, and her desolate longing for what she could never have. He blamed himself. And, damn it, she didn't want to, but she blamed him, too. His guilt and her shame had created so much distance between them that she didn't see how it could ever be overcome. They were spiraling down together into a dark, dark place. She didn't know how to stop them.

She undressed, turned off the light and got under the covers. She stared off into the darkness until she drifted into sleep. She dreamed again of walking alone, through the desert, the endless grains of sand shifting beneath her feet.

_I have no Life but this—  
To lead it here—  
Nor any Death—but lest  
Dispelled from there—_

_Nor tie to Earths to come—  
Nor Action new—  
Except through this extent—  
The Realm of you—_

_~Emily Dickinson_


End file.
